In 1965, Bob Dylan, the leading songwriter of the American folk music revival,Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre (). began recording and performing with electric instruments, generating controversy in the folk music community.
The response to his albums The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and The Times They Are a-Changin' led the media to label him the "spokesman of a generation". In March 1965, Dylan released his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. Side one features him backed by a rock band, while side two features him accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. In June of that year, Dylan began recording his next album, Highway 61 Revisited, which featured a more fully integrated folk rock sound. After recording a few of the songs, Dylan took a six-week break.
On July 20, 1965, he released his single from that album, "Like a Rolling Stone." Five days later, he took the main stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and performed his first concert with electric instruments: one song from Bringing It All Back Home and two songs from Highway 61 Revisited. He was joined on piano/organ by Barry Goldberg and three members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: guitarist Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay, and also with Al Kooper playing organ or bass—he played bass on "Like a Rolling Stone" while Goldberg played organ.
Some sections of the audience booed the performance. Members of the folk movement, including Irwin SilberIn November 1964, Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out!, published an "Open Letter to Bob Dylan" criticizing him for stepping away from political song writing (). and Ewan MacColl, criticized him for moving away from political songwriting and for performing with a rock band. After Newport, Dylan continued recording Highway 61 Revisited, which featured an electric sound on all but one song. He continued his transformation towards electric music on Blonde on Blonde (1966).
On subsequent tours throughout 1965 and 1966, his electric sets (now backed by the Hawks) were often met with derision from the audience. Crowds became particularly acrimonious during a British tour, including an oft-cited incident in Manchester, where a member of the crowd shouted "Judas!" at Dylan. Shows from this tour have been documented in several Dylan documentaries, including 2005's No Direction Home. Over time, Dylan continued to evolve musically, turning to country music on Nashville Skyline (1969), and drifting through numerous styles throughout the rest of his career. Retrospectively, his electric period has come to be recognized by critics and fans as producing some of his best music, and his controversial performance at Newport has been considered a pivotal moment in the development of folk rock. The incident was portrayed in the 2024 film A Complete Unknown, as well as the 2007 film I'm Not There. Newport 1965 set
At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan had been received enthusiastically when he performed "Blowin' in the Wind" with Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; and other performers. At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed "With God on Our Side" and "Mr. Tambourine Man". Positive reviews of Dylan's 1964 performance were accompanied by criticisms of his antics and dismissive nature; one critic wrote that "being stoned had rarely prevented his giving winning performances, but he was clearly out of control". During the same festival, Johnny Cash had played an electric set. Cash, who held major influence over Dylan, also motivated Dylan's break with standard protest-themed folk music with a letter Cash wrote to the editor of Broadside in March 1964, where Cash demanded that people at the Newport Music Festival "shut up and let him sing." At the time of Cash's death in 2003, Dylan stated that "Johnny wrote the magazine saying to shut up and let me sing, that I knew what I was doing. This was before I had ever met him, and the letter meant the world to me. I’ve kept the magazine to this day."
On Saturday, July 24, 1965, Dylan performed three acoustic songs, "All I Really Want to Do", "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" at a Newport workshop.Dylan's performances were filmed by Murray Lerner and included in the DVD The Other Side of the Mirror. According to Jonathan Taplin, a roadie at Newport (and later a road manager for the acts of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman), Dylan decided on Saturday he would challenge the Festival by performing with a fully amplified band the following night. Taplin said Dylan had been irritated by what he considered condescending remarks festival organizer Alan Lomax had made introducing the Paul Butterfield Blues Band for an earlier set. According to festival founder George Wein, Lomax said something to the effect of, "Now here we've got these guys, and they need all of this fancy hardware to play the blues... Let's find out if these guys can play it at all." According to Wein, these remarks provoked a fistfight backstage between Lomax and Grossman, who also managed Butterfield. According to Taplin, Dylan's response was, "'Well, fuck them if they think they can keep electricity out of here, I'll do it.' On a whim, he said he wanted to play electric." Dylan assembled a band and rehearsed that night at a mansion being used by festival organizer George Wein.
On the night of Sunday, July 25, Dylan's appearance was between Cousin Emmy and the Sea Island singers, two traditional acts. Dylan's band included two musicians who had played on his recently released single "Like a Rolling Stone": Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar and Al Kooper on organ. Two of Bloomfield's bandmates from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay, also appeared at Newport, as well as Barry Goldberg on piano and organ. The live organ on "Like a Rolling Stone" at Newport was played by Barry Goldberg. Although Al Kooper played organ on the studio recording of this song, at Newport he switched to bass replacing Jerome Arnold.
Footage of the Newport performance appears in the documentary films Festival (1967), No Direction Home (2005) and The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963–1965 (2007). Both boos and cheers are heard a few bars into Dylan's first song, "Maggie's Farm" and continue throughout his second, "Like a Rolling Stone". Dylan and his band then performed "Phantom Engineer", an early version of "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry". Dylan was said to have "electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other".
After "Phantom Engineer", Dylan and the band left the stage. Booing and clapping are in the background. When emcee Peter Yarrow returned to the microphone, he begged Dylan to continue performing. According to Robert Shelton, when Dylan returned to the stage, he discovered he did not have the right harmonica and said to Yarrow, "What are you doing to me?" Dylan then asked the audience for "an E harmonica". Within a few moments, a clatter of harmonicas hit the stage. Dylan performed two songs on acoustic guitar for the audience: "Mr Tambourine Man" followed by "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." The crowd exploded with applause, calling for more. Dylan did not return to the Newport festival for 37 years. In an enigmatic gesture, Dylan performed at Newport in 2002 sporting a wig and fake beard.
Audience reaction
Joe Boyd, who worked with Paul Rothchild on the sound mixing for the festival, described the audience reaction in his memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.
Filmmaker Murray Lerner and others present at Newport argued that the boos were from outraged folk fans who disliked Dylan playing an electric guitar. Others present, including musician Al Kooper, disagreed, arguing that the audience were upset by poor sound quality and the short duration of the set. "The reason they booed is that he only played for fifteen minutes when everybody else played for forty-five minutes or an hour," Kooper would later recall. "They were feeling ripped off. Wouldn't you? They didn't give a shit about us being electric. They just wanted more."Williamson, N. The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan, (1st ed., 2004), p. 54 According to performers Ian & Sylvia Tyson, it was "an angry, startled reaction" but that "it was a hostile audience" that year for other performers also.
In 2007, Lerner released on DVD his complete footage of Dylan's three appearances at Newport: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963–1965. When interviewed by Mojo magazine, Lerner was asked: "There's been a lot of debate over the years as to who exactly was doing the booing and who were they booing? Dylan? The organizers? The shortness of the set?" Lerner replied: "It's a good question. When we showed the film at The New York Film Festival [in October 2007] one kid gets up and says, 'About this booing... I was sitting right in front of the stage, there was no booing in the audience whatsoever. There was booing from the performers'. So I said, Well, I don't think you're right. Then another kid gets up and says 'I was a little further back and it was the press section that was booing, not the audience', and I said, Well, I don't think you're right. A third guy gets up and says 'I was there, and there was no question, it was the audience that was booing and there was no booing from the stage'. It was fascinating. People remember hearing what they thought they should hear. I think they were definitely booing Dylan and a little bit Pete Yarrow because he was so flustered. He was not expecting that audience's reaction and he was concerned about Bob's image since they were part of the same family of artists through Al Grossman. But I absolutely think that they were booing Dylan going electric."
Interviewed in San Francisco, on December 3, 1965, Dylan was asked whether he was "surprised the first time the boos came?" He responded: "That was at Newport. Well, I did this very crazy thing, I didn't know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I'll tell you that. You could hear it all over the place.... I mean, they must be pretty rich, to be able to go some place and boo. I couldn't afford it if I was in their shoes."Television Press Conference, KQED, San Francisco, reprinted in
Controversy around Pete Seeger's reaction Poor sound quality was the reason musician Pete Seeger, who was backstage, gave for disliking the performance: he says he told the audio technicians, "Get that distortion out of his voice ... It's terrible. If I had an axe, I'd chop the microphone cable right now." Seeger has also said, however, that he only wanted to cut the cables because he wanted the audience to hear Dylan's lyrics properly because he thought they were important. Rumors that Seeger actually had an axe, or that a festival board member pulled or wanted to pull out the entire electrical wiring system are apocryphal. In the film No Direction Home, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, who was Pete Seeger's brother-in-law, states that Seeger wanted to lower the volume of the band because the noise was upsetting his elderly father Charles, who wore a hearing aid. In the same film, Dylan claimed that Seeger's unenthusiastic response to his set was like a "dagger in his heart" and made him "want to go out and get drunk".